Aggression Drills and Skills Balancing

Aggression Drills and skills balancing.

When it comes to self-defence, it is useless to pretend that attacks are carried out with unheard-of violence.

The execution of drills without the component of aggression and violence does not allow you to really understand the dynamics and intensity of a real attack and to control your instinctive reactions to replace them with correct and effective reactions or learn to manage them.

Aggression

exercises are an important part of developing a reality-based self-defense system.

I’m not deliberately talking to you about names, systems or anything else (Krav Maga, Systema, Personal Self Defence, etc.) because it is something that goes beyond the name of the system and the art you practice, I also do not want anyone to feel the owner of the truth about self-defense because it is of people and that’s it.

I say this because when it comes to self-defense you should never talk about what is better or worse as art but what works and what does not work and that allows people to save their skin or limit the damage.

I believe that on these issues given the delicacy, everyone should humbly take a step back and put themselves “at the service” because the only thing certain and if you are honest you know, no one can offer the final solution because the difference is made by the person, not the system and this is what needs to be put at the center.

Too often I have seen selling a product and belts more than a real result conquered bythe person, for the person, something that can really be carried with him and that changes his life for his new awareness.

It is not the T-shirt with the inscription that will give you the ability to defend yourself for this I focus more on the person than on calling with a name a method, because they are concepts that those who are really inside these topics in a professional way know well that they do not belong to anyone.

It is also a very vast and complex issue because the classic legitimate but wrong question is often asked “What is the best art for self-defense?”because my answer is “what do you want and have to defend yourself from? ” Why do I mind saying this and who doesn’t explain it to you that it’s an important path and that it needs time and professional technical training or do you trust those who show you a one-hour knife lesson every 3-6 months and with that lesson you think you can have some chance from an assault or knife threat?

Or you think that because you throw a few punches and kicks to a shield you think you can stop an aggressor who weighs 20 kg more than you (a classic vs woman).

You have to be more honest with yourself or yourself if you want to talk about self-defense because unfortunately it is not sport and if you see law enforcement officers who are people used to being in the middle of the Violence, who are often in difficulty in certain situations, do you think it is easier for you?

Ah yes, it is true that you were taught the kick in the balls, fingers in the eyes, in fact all the attackers stand with their legs open ready to receive your football that you have definitely coached “very much”.

As you know if you read the blog I spent many posts on issues that go beyond combat, then the bloody part of the physical clash but it is also important to work on this aspect to associate with the psychology of combat.

Knowing all the techniques of the world will not help you if in the moment of truth you are not able to implement them aggressively in a real life situation.

I’ve talked about these issues in several articles related to personal defense that you find here on the blog, but this post is to begin to understand how gradually you need to train and practice to acquire the skills and psychological skills to go from a condition 0 to 100 of violence and aggression in an instant.

Aggressive training also helps you overcome fear, hesitation and nervousness, all of which are common to our nature.

If you are too nervous to react, you will not be able to have a correct reaction, indeed you may even get stuck instead of reacting without doing anything or running away or attacking.

In armies around the world, aggressive training exercises are an integral part of the programs, but sometimes, when military instructors teach civilians, something that often happens with some Israeli military who teach the Krav Maga, they forget that the seminary participants are not combatant soldiers and for this reason many factors need to be taken into account by balancing skills to prevent it from becoming just a circus show and that those who participate in the seminary are not combative soldiers. you don’t bring home anything but say that beautiful tosti and I would say thank you to ca. or pity that the internship pays him to learn something otherwise you were watching a match.

Why do I give this talk about training against aggression?

Because it’s like this article, you who are reading can be a super expert as a person who has practiced some martial art or combat sports, or you have never done anything, as you can well understand you can not have the same approach with people with different experiences because you would risk being too soft with the expert bored or disappointing him and too hard with those who have never done anything scaring him and making him/think that it is not suitable or suitable for that kind.

Aggressive training is key but the way you get there depends largely on the participants who are there:

• Traditional martial arts students for a fun lesson on a Saturday afternoon?
• Company employees attending a team building course?
• Girls taking a self-defense class?
• Cops or prison guards who need to complete a training course?
• Militants about to be sent on a mission?
• Motivated civilian kids who want to learn self-defense to have fun and become safer?
• Bouncers doing a training course?
• et cetera.

As you can see we can go on writing because everyone has their own reason and their training needs but the thing that needs to be clear is that the way you get to do aggressive drills has to be built by doing a careful balance of skills.

The point of arrival is the same but the time and degrees to get there are different for obvious educational, educational, psychological, motivational reasons.

All this must be taken into account!

Ps. The curious thing is that often at the end some who looked like lambs become lions and those that seemed hard and tough become much more meek, because your true character does not really discover it until you really need it.

Aggression Drills and Levels of Aggression in Training:

• Low-level aggression – (Informational seminar or group of new students, start of a new course, business courses, seniors) – Explains the concepts of how to use aggression, demonstrates lightly with a member of your team’s staff but without actual violent contact. You don’t have to scare anyone by beating up your staff member. You just have to show the movements. Many students are not ready for the real world, and they don’t need to fool them. Start explaining concepts related to prevention, context analysis, etc.
  
• Mid-level aggression – (Martial arts practitioners who train regularly) – Use pad work and heavy sacks for drilling. Explain concepts related to prevention, context analysis, etc. going to build case studies and situations. Try drills with first contact with pads and equipment. More detailed technical explanations.
• High-level aggression – (Reality of self-defense with partner training) – Wear the full protections (depending on the type of drills more or less complete but always to work safely), do the drills and drills but in this case against each other, do short sparring periods, rest, switch to another partner. Set of push ups, more fights, series of sit ups, more fights or kicks to the sack and shields and then fights. The exercises are intended to exhaust you before sparring drills. Put on music from “high intensity combat” or just coaches and trainers who shout a lot. Make it look real.
• Top-level aggression – (Combat troops, special forces, etc.); No full protection. Run for half an hour, then hit the heavy bag for 20 minutes with combinations of jabs, crosses, elbows and knees, low kicks. Drills: One person holds a shield while another hits and advances, during this time the other soldiers hit the participant, must learn to focus, tune the pain and move forward. Drills: Push up until your arms and hands are sore, then hit the heavy bag, then fight with a mate at the start. etc., many of these drills can be created, but the goal is to condition them to never stop and give up.
  

Now these 4 levels of drills with aggression are to be contextualized to scenarios that should be taken into account as :

1. Stop
2. Detention
3. Ritualized clash
4. Brawl
5. Armed robbery
   
6. Security, New10
7. Terrorism
8. Sexual violence
9. White Weapons
10. Etc. etc.
    

Based on this there are hundreds of drills and that’s why I want you to understand that when I tell you what you want to defend yourself from it becomes an important question because that’s where you want to start.

This is why the educational program we use is built for YOU and is not something generalist where you see everything in bites and bites with the result that you have seen many things but you do not know how to do any.

Self-defense is a path, it is a university with many subjects and that is why we built it so with a professional education.

Now returning to the topic of drills with aggression ( aggression drills ) a premise due, who is used to doing fights and sparring non-cooperative for their own fun or for training and preparation for the match is used to physical confrontation and some things may seem trivial, but consider that there are many people who do not do combat sports and martial arts who want to start learning to defend themselves and must have but as many times I wrote in the blog the passage to combat sports or fighting, etc. is mandatory because it is not that you can fight without protections and without rules if you want to learn the striking or the fight or the stick, the knife, etc.

So the passage through sport is very preparatory for the practical part of those who make self-defense with the knowledge that we are talking about two very different contexts.

We all know that there is nothing chivalrous in street fights where there is no referee to kick off and that maybe those who throw a punch at you do it while they are apologising or while you are turned back not to mention the aggressions where you are approached with the most devious methods and excuses.

Stress levels

Exercises that create high levels of stress used in lessons are perhaps the most critical and beneficial aspect of self-defense training at the same time, but for a reason that might not seem so obvious at first.

For the new student but it also applies many times to the veteran student, stress training such as summary exercises, multiple attack drills, “ring of fire” drills and others, can be experiences that disorient and overwhelm.

Students may also get to feel insecure about the fear or anxiety they feel during these exercises, asking if they can ever overcome their instincts to escape, not to face combat, or others who did not expect certain reactions under severe stress, correct reactions, or wrong reactions.

The truth is that students tend to be overly fixed on their “hardness” when they are in a normal situation or on their perceived lack of strength and ability (insecurity and low self-esteem) and when they are under severe stress they are not almost aware of the natural and often uncontrollable response to the stress of their body.

Those natural reactions you can’t know until you feel that hard stress.

While stress drills aim to improve your technique (and yes, make you harder), they also aim to bizarrely modify the biological processes over time that create these reactions and also psychological.

In his book Blink,an exploration of the ability to make sudden judgments, Malcolm Gladwell refers to Dave Grossman,a former Army lieutenant colonel, and his research on the relationship between heart rate and brain functioning. As Gladwell notes, at a heart rate of 175.

“The blood withdraws from our outer muscle layer and concentrates in the central muscle mass. The evolutionary point is to make the muscles as hard as possible – turn them into a kind of armor and limit bleeding in case of injury. But that leaves us clumsy and helpless. Grossman says everyone should practice calling 911 for that very reason, because he’s heard of too many situations where, in an emergency, people pick up the phone and can’t perform these basic functions. With their heart rate on the rise and their motor coordination deteriorating, they make up 411 and not 911 because that’s the only number they remember [. . .] “You have to try,” Grossman says, “because only if you’ve tried, it’s going to be there.”

Dialing a simple or familiar phone number? How about fighting five attackers at the same time?

Any trained and knowledgeable Personal Defense instructor knows that no matter how a student performs a defense during the technical-only part of the lesson, the student’s cognition and motor skills will naturally break down in a stress exercise.

No matter how hard or aggressive you think you are, your body’s natural response to stress has the potential to render you powerless.

Drills and appropriate repetitions will condition you to effectively manage your body’s stress and successfully defend yourself.

Gladwell also recounts his experience training protection agents at Gavin De Becker & Associates, particularly how they train to defend themselves against a dog attack, in which they are actually attacked by an aggressive (presumably trained) dog repeatedly.

“At first, their heart rate is 175. They can’t see straight. Then the second or third time, it’s 120, and then it’s 110, and they can work De Beckersays.

As you can see with the repetition of the same danger at the end the physiological reactions vary allowing you to have a more correct and controlled reaction.

It is essential to understand that all of us, despite our experience or our degree of experience, share this same vulnerability, as evidence suggests because everyone has different fears and you cannot know what kind of aggression you will suffer and how.

It is also for this reason that qualified instructors try to take you out of their comfort zones,and they do it rightly because they know that everything they are teaching you is useless if you can’t do it under severe stress.

They know that it is absolutely vital to learn how to manage stress and figure out how to compensate for the body’s natural reaction to stress, so that you can successfully deal with an attack.

Ultimately, it’s this “general rehearsal” (as Grossman calls it) that really prepares you for a real-life situation.

I saw fighter sleeping on the bench in the locker room before the match so much they were used to that situation.

2 easy drills to start with:

Drill shots in combination:

• Jab, cross, jab, knee kick.
• Jab, cross, jab, upper cut.
• Jab, cross, jab, low kick.
• Jab, cross, upper cut, upper cut.
• Jab, low kick, elbow smash.
• Front kick, cross, elbow, knee.

There are many Drills that you can build using these simple combinations.

Practice them at full speed, at full power until students fall to the ground exhausted and then do it again because they have to learn about the feeling of feeling too tired to continue.

Drill Get Up

You’re lying on the floor surrounded by your training partners, trying to get up while a group of “fighters” are trying to hold you back, you have to get up and fight against the group to get out of the circle.

The goal is to get up and get out of the circle.

The Drills of the day!!

A good personal defense course should tend to provide in each lesson a moment of “real chaos” lasting only 1 minute but that actually goes to build the most important thing you do for your self-defense.

In the spetsnaz, the Russian special forces, every day a minute of boxing is done tight with gloves from 10 Oz, a tight minute no stop, without too much technique but with a high intensity of blows, clearly them without helmets and protections but only gloves and mouthguards. Basically a one-to-one brawl every day, you understand what it means, right? How does this transform anyone?

At the end of each of the lessons in our gym must be carried out this “exercise to chaos” but to make the thing even more unexpected you do it not at the end but randomly just to get used to a change from a situation we say more “relaxed” to a situation of maximum tension and chaos.

The drills of the day are explained at the beginning of the lesson that everyone knows what to do and at a given command starts the minute of chaos.

Every Drills and there are hundreds (I will do some dedicated articles) are built in specific and contextualized form but I do not want to go into detail now because this is not the theme of this post.

In these tutorials one of the important things is theswitch,when the instructor screams “the magic word”, must immediately trigger the reaction to do what we set out that day, each with its own role.

This step is important because the reaction time to a stimulus can make a difference!.

This Time/Delay in the reaction must theoretically be zeroed out!

Those who participate in these kinds of lessons generally say they hate them… because this tension, this unpredictability does not make the lessons pleasant, but after a while he says it with a smile printed on his face, he begins to feel the importance because he feels inside of himself how his person is improving.

Why incorporate this type of training? Why do these “cursed and hate drills”?

• They simulate a fight! Those who do these tutorials for the first few times are always surprised at how a one-minute drills looks like it’s from five. It’s hard to believe that you’ve “consumed” yourself in just one minute. This is how it’s fighting and fighting, stress and all the work in a real fight makes you “get out of oxygen” in seconds.
• They put “In Fighting” on you! Do this type of training for a few weeks and already begin to become easier, entering a much better form of combat. Let “the bad guy” be the only one who snorts and puffs after 15 seconds… and you who continue to have the energy and explosiveness to kick “kick in the ass!”
• Not only technical but reality! If you’re just training techniques you have no idea how they’ll work under stress and fatigue. If you compete as a combat sport you know what I’m talking about but guess what? In reality there is no regulation and a referee who comes to your rescue if there is no more. In the violence of the real world and unfortunately there is a lot of it!! One thing that often happens during drills under high stress is to see that you are two meters away from a person participating in the drills and shout “run!!” at full voice (the signal that indicates to take a shot as if to escape) and they do not hear it. This is something that can happen under stressful conditions. Audio exclusion, not seeing things properly (tunnel effect), not hearing things, etc. occur under stress and it’s a good lesson to make students feel firsthand in a tutorial what can happen to their body. Just a little stress and these things happen. Imagine the level at which it can come when you are under the stress of someone who is actually trying to attack you, hurt you, rape you or even kill you!
• This is the chore attitude you’ve built to survive! After doing a ton of these exercises you know that you can go on even if you feel exhausted, with pain, exhausted, etc. You won’t stop when it matters because you’ve been trained to move forward.
• It’s a mentality! If you’re in a 2-on-1 fight or any other bad situation you’ll feel like you’ve already been there, you’ve already done that. Your body will respond, you will have trained for that same situation. You’ve trained to move forward, be brutal and never give up! This eliminates the “freezing” and the reaction will come out of you without thinking about it. This is a good conditioning! When your reaction comes thoughtlessly to a certain put respond with a certain out put related to the situation.

If you’re teaching self-defense without this kind of conditioning, without putting what you’re doing under stress and fatigue, fear, sudden events, etc. you’re not teaching yourself to defend yourself but you’re teaching self-defense techniques but there’s a big difference!

YOU HAVE TO WATCH because you have a great responsibility!

Street Fight Mentality

Andrea